“It is important to keep the moral high ground in all this.”
The e-mail is below.
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date: Fri Nov 6 15:10:34 2009
from: Phil Jones
subject: Recent climate claims in some media web sites
to: “Watson, Robert (SEG)”
Bob,
Jacquie and Alastair alerted me that you’d noted the claims on some media
sites over the
past month. They are not just affecting CRU/UEA but the Met Office, Hadley
Centre as well.
There have been two basic issues
1. A tree-ring chronology developed by Russian colleagues at Yamal. Keith
Briffa has
responded to this on the CRU web site.
[1]http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/briffa/yamal2009/
The skeptics are still going on about this and refuting what he is saying.
Yamal is used
in 3 of the long reconstructions in spaghetti plots and then it is one of 20.
Its omission
would not change anything.
It is important to keep the moral high ground in all this. Keith will be
writing a
peer-review journal paper which he hopes to submit around March/April. It is
important that
science gets published in the normal way – in the literature. Blog sites are
not the way
this should be done. I know things are moving this way, but there needs to be
something
fixed. Blog sites are moving targets, issues change from day to day. We can’t
do science
this way.
On this and the second issue – the chief skeptic (Stephen McIntyre) is
sensible enough to
realize that the global temperature series is robust and the millennial
reconstructions are
also, but to a lesser extent. They refuse to develop their own, refuse to
publish their
results – because they know that if they did the series would look much the
same. So they
knock away at the edges at issues that are unimportant but give them some
media attention
amongst people who are ready to accept conspiracy theories. They are also
trying to waste
our time with their claims, so we’ve chosen to barely respond and only
through our web
site.
2. The second issue is the release of the station temperature data by
ourselves and the
Met Office.
UEA has had about 60 FOI requests about this and the Met Office has had
about 20.
The Met Office HC are going to send a letter around to all Met Services to
check that we
can release the versions of their data we have. This is the crucial thing –
we’re using the
data we have for France, which isn’t the same as the data the French has for
France. France
was a random choice of country.
What is important to global average temperatures is the marine data. I
think skeptics
realize this, but it is much harder for them to do any work in this area.
There was a PQ in the House earlier this week (see below). I was asked to
respond as was
John Mitchell. I said that the Met Office were going to ask all other Met
Services the
question above.
If you want to talk about any of this – give me a call or email.
The timing of all this relates to me to issues in the US and Copenhagen.
Keith and I have
had some really nasty personal emails, but I think we’ve yet to reach the
number that Mike
Mann or Ben Santer have had.
Cheers
Phil
“The Met Office HC are going to send a letter around to all Met Services to
check that we
can release the versions of their data we have. This is the crucial thing –
we’re using the
data we have for France, which isn’t the same as the data the French has for
France.”
So, the version of the data that was used was not the same as the country’s own archived data. Was this similar to the Russians protesting that the data being used didn’t match theirs, etc? How many countries wouldn’t recognize their own data if they saw what had been done to it in these papers? Would it make the adjustments more obvious to everyone if it got out? Is that one of the reasons that they fought so hard to keep it under wraps?